Talk:Empress Theresa (Book)/@comment-216.114.196.162-20191204201014/@comment-44644328-20191215184320
quote I told you guys there'd be a copycat someday. It's an easy role to play. This guy takes it a little too far, though. Emptherauthor's plenty antagonistic but he's never stooped to being vulgar to make his points. How can he claim he made up the ultimate role model then? Work on that and try again, pal. Maybe you'll get the part next time. :) end quote I see. You clowns doubt that I'm the real Norman Boutin, hunh? I still have a copy of the book before I changed it to first persen narration POV. The story was then 142,000 words long. Changing it to first person narration cut it down considerably. Here's the opening pages of chapter one: it's from the 2010 version of Empress Theresa which nobody has ever seen. xxxxxxxxxxxxx When Theresa Elizabeth Sullivan was a three year old girl in Malden, Massachusetts, and Jonathan Sheffield was President of the United States, Keith Banks, an Arizona high school teacher and amateur astronomer, walked to his backyard observatory. He was a comet hunter. His hope was to discover a major comet and have it named after himself to get himself in the history books. His ten foot high domed shed sheltered a twelve inch reflecting telescope constructed by his father in a time when kids had time to do such things. Attached to the eyepiece was a digital camera with a USB cable that sent images to a computer screen. His strategy trusted to luck to find him fame. He picked a piece of paper out of a small wooden box of slips of paper with the names of constellations visible that time of year. He read Cassiopeia. It was as good as any. The odds of discovering a comet was about the same in any part of the sky; they came from every direction. He typed instructions into the computer to have the motorized equatorial mount direct the telescope towards the center of Cassiopeia. This technology would have amazed his father. The computer program detected Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 2 any change in position of a point of light and traced its path. With luck it would take about half an hour to get a one eighth inch line of a comet flight path on his computer screen. He went online and entered his favorite astronomy message board. Many members were comet hunters like himself. All active message boards were cluttered by useless threads and posts, and this one was no exception. Fortunately, this board was un-moderated, which meant that if somebody was a particularly annoying pest you could attack him with all kinds of insults. It was great fun. Somebody claimed he had just found a new comet and gave the coordinates. Somebody else replied, “We’ve been following it for a week, you damn idiot! Sober up!” He laughed and clicked back to the star field program. He jerked to attention. There was already an inch long line on the screen. This comet had to be very close to Earth. Then,…….. he noticed. The line was curving upwards to the left. No inanimate object drifting through space traveled in a curve! “Oh my God!” Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 3 The SR-71 Blackbird was the fastest plane the U.S. government would admit existed. The Air Force claimed a top Blackbird speed of 2,300 m.p.h., but experts thought the true number might be around 3,000. It was a large, long, black bodied plane that was all wing and jet engine. It was unarmed. It’s dual missions were reconnaissance and interception. Reconnaissance had been taken over by satellites since the plane was built in 1964. The Blackbird was now retired from military use and served scientific research. Word was flashed to the Pentagon that something was coming down from space. By luck a Blackbird was ready for immediate launch. Frantic phone calls were made. The plane set off. It climbed up to 80,000 feet with its nose and wings red hot from air friction. The mysterious object’s exact location was monitored by telescopes on the ground. High speed cameras were readied on the Blackbird to photograph this object. It was a mile ahead of the plane. A second later, half a mile ahead. A second later, a white streak went by the Blackbird’s left. The first pictures were transmitted to the ground. The visitor appeared to be a white sphere about a hundred feet in diameter. There were no discernible features. It looked like a giant snowball. Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 4 The Blackbird made a wide circle to reverse direction, a time consuming procedure when you had to decelerate over Mach 3 in one direction and resume an opposite Mach 3. It passed the white sphere again with the same findings: nothing to speak of. The object kept going lower and ordinary jet fighters took over surveillance. They passed by the object many times. Something interesting they noticed was that the object completely ignored them. Perhaps it was not aware of them? The sphere reached low altitudes where helicopters could come in closer for a longer and more detailed look. Their pictures showed no more that those of the Blackbird’s. The object was a one hundred foot wide white sphere with no features. That was it. It was about to reach the ground in a wooded area in Eastern Massachusetts. The helicopter crews wondered what it would do when it hit the trees and ground. Would it bounce, change into something else, explode? They were not prepared for what actually happened. As this one hundred foot wide object reached the ground, it simply disappeared into the Earth. Not even the leaves on the trees the object passed through had been disturbed. The people in the helicopters were shocked into silence for Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 5 minutes after seeing this impossibility. On the day of a new President's inauguration, it was the custom of the outgoing President to meet the President-elect at the bottom of the steps of the White House South portico and pose for the cameras, all smiles on everyone for everyone, to show that in the United States power was transferred in an orderly manner. President Jonathan Sheffield and President-elect James Gardner posed and exchanged political niceties for a few moments. Then President Sheffield invited his successor to the limousine with the obligatory 'after you' hand signal used by diplomats. Once the two men were seated the limousine left the White House grounds to go to the Capitol for the Chief Executive's swearing in. The media always wondered what two men from opposing parties said to each other during this traditional ride. It was never revealed. This was between them. Senator James Gardner dutifully waited for President Sheffield to open the conversation. It was the outgoing President’s last hurrah moment and he deserved to orchestrate it as he wished. Halfway through the slow ride President Sheffield finally spoke. Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 6 “I memorized some opening lines to an Edgar Allen Poe story. It applies to your Presidency. 'Phenomena have occurred of a nature so completely unexpected, so entirely novel, so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions, as to leave no doubt in my mind that ere long all is in uproar, all science in ferment, all reason folly'. It was something like that.” James Gardner let a respectful moment pass to give the President's final statement dignity. “Mr. President. I know the job is the most difficult in the world. I've devoted my life to preparing for it.” “Some things are impossible to deal with. You sit there waiting for something to happen. You can’t do anything until something does happen but you have no idea what it will be and your contingency plan is a blank piece of paper. You can’t even talk to anybody about it. It‘s a nightmare.” The President was quiet for a moment to let this gloomy assessment sink in. “There's an office in the Pentagon nobody knows anything about. It's called OOPS. They'll call you in a few days.“ With that, President Sheffield stared out the window and would say no more. Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 7 Theresa Elizabeth Sullivan's earliest known ancestor in America, Mark Sullivan, came from Ireland long after the potato famine. The family thought he had worked as a blacksmith somewhere in the Boston area, but remembered nothing else about him. The blacksmith part of the story was probably a quaint invention to cover up a less glamorous trade typical of the new Irish at that time. The story stuck. His name became a legend because he was the patriarch. The family referred to themselves as the Blacksmith Mark Sullivans to distinguish themselves from other clans of the same name. His greatest accomplishment was to sire three sons all of whom had their own sons. The Blacksmith Mark clan was firmly established. All descendants would have a familial tradition on which to build their own well-grounded personae. Mark’s son Patrick, and two brothers, operated a hardware store in Braintree, just South of Boston. It was assumed they had started the establishment because at some point they owned it and could not have bought it. The store survived into the 1960s in descendants’ hands. Patrick and his two brothers had a total of sixteen sons and daughters in the Irish tradition. Their sisters also married and had numerous children under other Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 8 names. Patrick's third son, John, worked in the family's hardware store for a while and moved North to Natick, Massachusetts where he started his own store. His son, another Patrick, deviated from the mercantile tradition to work in the still new electricity industry. He became an electrician doing contract work for old factories that needed a lot of electrical modernization work. When this business played out, he opened a small electrical supply shop to service small business and private home needs. The second Patrick's son, Matthew, worked in his father’s electric business for a while, but found out he could make more money working for the new high technology companies building around Boston. It was Matthew who first dabbled in the stock market. His timing was lucky. By his late fifties he had a nest egg equal to fifteen years of his working life salary. It was divided equally among his six sons and daughters including Theresa's father Edward. Edward married Elizabeth James, a pretty brunette with one fourth Sullivan blood. In their third year of marriage they finally succeeded in having a child: Theresa Elizabeth Sullivan. She was given her mother's name as a middle name because it had a certain rhythm. Theresa was born Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 9 on May 8. Elizabeth Sullivan searched through the internet to find a female historical figure associated with this date. This was a challenge because females had made few noteworthy contributions to the passing parade. But there was one event in history that had made a very big difference. On May 8, 1429, Joan of Arc had succeeded in driving the invading English out of the critically important city of Orleans, thus changing the course of the ninety-one year old Hundred Years War and saving France as an independent nation. The consequences for the future history of Europe and the New World were beyond calculation. Elizabeth Sullivan began gathering books about Joan to give to her daughter later. Thanks to inheritance passed down from grandfather Matthew, Theresa's parent could provide a very nice small home in one of the better neighborhoods of Malden, Massachusetts. This was a convenient town to live in. You could easily drive to Route 138, Massachusetts's little Silicon Valley, where Edward Sullivan did his computer network consulting work. You could also climb up the stairs to the elevated section of the Orange Line which took you down in the ground, under the Charles River, to the Washington Street shopping district of downtown Boston in twenty minutes. A few steps from there you could go into the Park Street station and take the Norman Boutin / Empress Theresa 10 Green Line to the Fine Arts Museum, the Science Museum, and many other interesting sites, or take the Red Line to Harvard Square. Theresa was to be an only child and her parents made sure she had all the love a child needed. Their task was easy. Theresa was born with a good disposition. She was the happy child everyone wanted. It was she who ran around the house just for the joy of running, and lead the other curious kids to follow her. She never stopped talking. It was yakkety-yakkety-yak all day long. This was nothing more than exuberance. She was normal in every respect. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As you clowns can see, if you read the book, the current first person narration version is much better. It deleted the above verbiage and gets right to Theresa. Tom Clancy fans might recognize Clancy's style, and in fact it is. But Clancy's style was not fitting for a story centered around a teenage girl.